BE THE BIGG BOSS
From
tracking staff rants online to following them on GPS, here are must-have apps
for managers
It’s a Monday and your employee has called in sick. You know s/he is lying and has actually extended the weekend trip to Alibaug. But you can’t call his bluff. Or can you?
Playing the boss requires brilliance. But leading a workforce is not easy, especially with work shirking and blame games. Technology, however, has a soft spot for the bosses. Here’s a round-up of apps that will help you stay on top of the game.
GPS TRACKING PRO Platform: Android, iOS, Price: Free
You are waiting at an important meeting and your team is blaming the Central and Western Railways for their tardiness. Do you suspect they are still at home?
Download this app to track their location. The app gives you real-time location updates of your employees’ position. All you have to do is download it and create accounts for phones you want to track. Once the phone is registered on the app, the app’s map interface will show icons with pictures of all employees and their exact locations.
It claims to use 28 satellites to triangulate the exact location of every phone registered in the account. If the phones happen to be out of view, the app uses cell phone triangulation via phone carriers.
You are waiting at an important meeting and your team is blaming the Central and Western Railways for their tardiness. Do you suspect they are still at home?
Download this app to track their location. The app gives you real-time location updates of your employees’ position. All you have to do is download it and create accounts for phones you want to track. Once the phone is registered on the app, the app’s map interface will show icons with pictures of all employees and their exact locations.
It claims to use 28 satellites to triangulate the exact location of every phone registered in the account. If the phones happen to be out of view, the app uses cell phone triangulation via phone carriers.
FIREME! Platform: Twitter Handle: @WhyFired, Weblink: fireme.me Price: Free
You have to be living in la-la-land if you think that being the boss and being liked can go together. Still, if you are the curious sort and want to know what your team really thinks of you, this app is for you.
The recently launched German app FireMe! tracks those who writes inappropriate stuff about their boss or job on Twitter. Within minutes the app will highlight their tweet on its page for everyone to see along with their Twitter handle, profile picture and the time of post. (You could check if they were Tweeting while you were busy yelling at them). The posts are categorised as — haters, horrible bosses, sexual intercourse and potential killers.
To give you a clue these are the kind of tweets that FireMe! picked up: ‘I hate my job/ boss’, ‘My boss sucks a**’, ‘My boss is a d***,’… you get the drift.
You could find out if an employee is plotting murder by browsing under the potential killers category: ‘If I had 2 bullets to shoot Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and my boss. I’d shoot my boss twice’.
And here’s the best thing, if your employee sobered up and deleted the Tweet from his/her profile, FireMe! will still have it. Only a written request to the app managers could have it deleted.
If you do find your name or employee here, let it go. As we said earlier, you are living in the real world.
You have to be living in la-la-land if you think that being the boss and being liked can go together. Still, if you are the curious sort and want to know what your team really thinks of you, this app is for you.
The recently launched German app FireMe! tracks those who writes inappropriate stuff about their boss or job on Twitter. Within minutes the app will highlight their tweet on its page for everyone to see along with their Twitter handle, profile picture and the time of post. (You could check if they were Tweeting while you were busy yelling at them). The posts are categorised as — haters, horrible bosses, sexual intercourse and potential killers.
To give you a clue these are the kind of tweets that FireMe! picked up: ‘I hate my job/ boss’, ‘My boss sucks a**’, ‘My boss is a d***,’… you get the drift.
You could find out if an employee is plotting murder by browsing under the potential killers category: ‘If I had 2 bullets to shoot Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and my boss. I’d shoot my boss twice’.
And here’s the best thing, if your employee sobered up and deleted the Tweet from his/her profile, FireMe! will still have it. Only a written request to the app managers could have it deleted.
If you do find your name or employee here, let it go. As we said earlier, you are living in the real world.
CHAMPION LIE DETECTOR Platform: iOS, Price: Rs 55
It’s Thursday afternoon, Monday is a gazetted holiday and an employee is making noise about a severe headache. You suspect the headache will disappear when he sets off on an extended weekend by taking the Friday off but you obviously can’t tell him you think he’s lying. There’s an app that will do it for you.
The Lie Detector can analyse a person’s voice and determine whether or not s/he is lying. The app uses an algorithm that looks at pitch, frequency and peaks in the voice. It does a frequency comparison of the person’s truthful answers to the questionable ones. So it’s a good idea to record your team members’ voices. Pretend you are trying out the voice record feature in a new cell phone.
The app uses the science of microtremors — inaudible fluctuations in the voice produced by a person while talking. When a person becomes stressed, physical changes like increased blood flow cause the audio range of the microtremors to change. Lie Detector captures this change to determine how stressed, and therefore how truthful, a person is being.
It’s Thursday afternoon, Monday is a gazetted holiday and an employee is making noise about a severe headache. You suspect the headache will disappear when he sets off on an extended weekend by taking the Friday off but you obviously can’t tell him you think he’s lying. There’s an app that will do it for you.
The Lie Detector can analyse a person’s voice and determine whether or not s/he is lying. The app uses an algorithm that looks at pitch, frequency and peaks in the voice. It does a frequency comparison of the person’s truthful answers to the questionable ones. So it’s a good idea to record your team members’ voices. Pretend you are trying out the voice record feature in a new cell phone.
The app uses the science of microtremors — inaudible fluctuations in the voice produced by a person while talking. When a person becomes stressed, physical changes like increased blood flow cause the audio range of the microtremors to change. Lie Detector captures this change to determine how stressed, and therefore how truthful, a person is being.
EMPLOYEE TRACKER PRO Platform: iOS Price: Rs 500
Appraisal season has just kicked in and you are forgetting who put in extra hours to wrap up a project on deadline or whose mistake meant a loss of face for the entire team. As boss, it’s your job to remember, but, truth be spoken, it’s not simple. This app helps you keep a record of your employees’ hits and misses through the year.
It lets you enter an employee’s name and designation, and infractions/accolades at convenience. It also records the date and time of his actions, where they occurred, name of supervisor on duty that day, employer reaction, a photo/image, and a detailed description.
The app can be customised for all kinds of targets — sales, ability to come up with innovative ideas and meeting deadlines.
A free version of the app, called Employee Tracker Lite, is also available.
Appraisal season has just kicked in and you are forgetting who put in extra hours to wrap up a project on deadline or whose mistake meant a loss of face for the entire team. As boss, it’s your job to remember, but, truth be spoken, it’s not simple. This app helps you keep a record of your employees’ hits and misses through the year.
It lets you enter an employee’s name and designation, and infractions/accolades at convenience. It also records the date and time of his actions, where they occurred, name of supervisor on duty that day, employer reaction, a photo/image, and a detailed description.
The app can be customised for all kinds of targets — sales, ability to come up with innovative ideas and meeting deadlines.
A free version of the app, called Employee Tracker Lite, is also available.
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